displaying negative time

[Met Fan]

if I have expected hours of 45:00 and actual hours of 42:00 how can I display the result of their difference being 2:00 hours?

I can do a simple formula when the result is positive but not when it is negative.

 

[Gerald Higgins]

This is going to be difficult, for two reasons.

First, the difference is not 2 hours, it's 3 hours

Second, Excel struggles with negative time.
If you just want to display a negative result, and are not going to use that result for any other calculation, you could do something like this

=(A1-A2)*24

and format the result as number, with 2 decimal places, to show -3.00.

BUT, if you start having fractions of hours, such as 3h 30m, this would show as -3.50, not -3.30.
There are ways round this, but it gets complicated.

Perhaps the best solution is to use something like

=max(a1,a2)-min(a1,a2)

You could then have another formula which displays a message if the max and min are not the normally expected way round.